Every Child Can - A Conversation with Kiran Bir Sethi

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

If our value proposition was humane citizens with an I Can mindset, it had to show up in the timetable. That artifact was, I think, for us, the real innovation and the real design. It was like a thing of beauty when we put it together. Oh my God, that's it. That's the piece that—

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining me for another episode this week. My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. Believing that every child can is a fundamental commitment to the agency and creative capacity of each other. And it is a singular mission that has set Kiran Birsetti onto her amazing journey to build the world's most innovative school. With the recent release of her new book, Every Child Can: Riverside School's Design-Led Approach to Empower Children, it's amazing to have Kiran joining us again back on the podcast this week. You can check Check out our first conversation in episode 56. Kiran founded the Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India in 2001, and since winning the T4 Education World's Best School prize for innovation last year, Riverside is widely viewed as one of the most viable and successful alternatives to the traditional concept of what a school should be. As Kiran says, Riverside doesn't want to be the best school in the world, but the best school for the world.

It's lovely to see you again. It's been 3 years since last time. I can't believe it.

There's a book in the world.

Exactly. No, it's amazing. Huge congratulations on the book and also on the World School Prize for Innovation. I mean, you've had quite the 3 years.

Too many blessings. Yeah, it's been wonderful.

Amazing. Very good. Well, thank you. Yeah, thanks for joining again. The impetus for the this second conversation was your book, which obviously amazing to have it out in the world. I'm sure it's been a labor of love. I don't know how you do it, honestly, juggling the amount of things that you seem to be doing, but congratulations on the book. It's a really lovely, really readable, but like I said to you in our exchange, so many insights. So yeah, I'd love to just spend a little bit of time talking about, I don't want to go over the things that we spoke about in our first one, in a sense, I'd love people to go back. It was episode 56, but just one of the things that struck me reading the book, was just how strong for you this fundamental belief in people is, right? I mean, just in people's agency and creativity and just, you know, ability to impact the world, right? And, and I just, I love to maybe start just with your personal story in terms of where did that come from for you? I mean, you mentioned your parents at one point, but I just wonder, yeah, where has that come from for you, that foundation?

You know, writing the book allowed me to sort of introspect and figure out what influences allowed me to be the person I am or have the belief systems or the values. And I think so much of it I attributed to way back. I'm— it was a combination of family and me being the youngest of three. So even my, you know, being the youngest, it was significant in my upbringing. Just like my parents. My father was a maverick, you know, at that time as well. So I think that influenced subsequently my time at the design college. I would say these are the three really, really important foundations for me. So, and when I— lots of people have asked me, tell me, how do you have this, you know, joy? Or is this this belief? And I think so much of it was growing up with no understanding of embarrassment.

Interesting.

You know, so I think so much of my, my sister and my brother possibly have different memories of childhood because my sister was the oldest and then my brother. I think the time I came into the family, there was just so much more freedom, which I received as a child. I was never told that anything I did was embarrassing, you know, so that was critical. So I didn't understand embarrassment. I didn't understand gender. Both of these were not part of my upbringing. So I think in so many ways, I never realized that my gender had anything to do with my role or my competency or the way I moved in life. It was just me growing up and everything that was possible was possible and that I could say something. And so many anecdotes that I am told also, and I remember, lead up to this idea of being super easy with who I was and not having those stereotypes or those filters, which many people unfortunately go through. So I'll give you one anecdote. I'm told that when I was very young, my family, we would all go to this lovely restaurant called Koshi's in Bangalore, which had a jukebox. And I was very fond of this particular song. So I would tell my father to play a particular song. And then when everybody was sitting, I, of course, will take my mother's, you know, like scarf and start dancing all around the restaurant. My brother and my sister said, Papa, tell her to sit down. And my father said, let her go. And another one I remember clearly is when I was 12 years old, I was in an all-girls school. You can't get more traditional than a Bishop Cotton Girls' House.

Right.

But even there, we, for the first time, we were told to do a project. Never happened before. So it was a unique opportunity about like a pet or a dog or whatever. So the other group said, oh, we'll study a butterfly. And somebody said, we'll study an earthworm. Me being the person I was, I said, let's study a snake. Now you think about this, an all-girls school, a snake, unheard of. I took ₹2 from everyone. And they said, where do we get a snake from? I said, I will find a snake. So I go home. And this is a time of pre-internet, pre-everything. There used to be this Yellow Pages, you know, this big, we are that generation, I hope so. I opened the Yellow Pages, and I find this ad of the guy who had wildlife. And his shop or whatever was at the other end of the city. So I'm waiting for my father and mother to come home and I say, Papa, we have to go and get a snake. My mother all of a sudden, what struck her, said, okay, if dad says it's okay. My sister and brother were freaking out. The snake will stay in the house or we will stay in the house. It was a big drama. My mother of all people said, let us go. So we went all the way in an ambassador car to the other end of the city. My father's only thing was, if I could not look after it, I should let it go into the wild. But I had 4 rupees left. I, I didn't have the princely sum because we needed to get a box for the snake, you know, a glass box and everything. So my father said I had to wash the car and tend the thing to earn those 4 rupees. So what I'm trying to tell you is there were so many pieces, yeah, that just meant that if you had the right intent and you were able to understand everything else in terms of responsibility, go ahead and do it. And I came home with this snake and then I had to find food and frogs for it. Oh my God, it was a story.

I love it.

I had to let it go into the wild. But all of these, you know, added up. I got married before my sister in a time like, you know, where in Indian families the oldest should always get married first.

Okay.

So many of the things I witnessed and understood about what it could be. So I think I grew up asking those questions. Why not? Who said that? Must— of course, my education in design, the NID, was a game changer for me in terms of just understanding learning. And I've referenced a lot of that in some of the tools.

Yeah, I'd love to. Yeah, I'd love to talk about the design piece. But I think the reason— obviously, the book is called Every Child Can, right? And so there's— you can already hear, I'm sure, listening, lots of resonance in what you're talking about with regards to that, just that deep belief in people, right? And I think the reason I ask you is cuz I feel like that's really fundamentally important to what you do and all the incredible work that you've done, but also just in general to an attitude towards a particular kind of education that I personally believe we need more and more of. But it doesn't just, it doesn't just come from the technical aspects of how do we do school or how do we do timetable or, you know, those are important and we'll talk about some of those things, but Actually where the foundation for a lot of this is really in a, a deep belief in the agency and the capacity of other people. And so it feels like, you know, maybe you are passing on some of those experiences that you had as a child growing up to all the children you are working with. And then hopefully, you know, vicariously through all the other amazing, uh, schools that are doing similar things to you. But I think I just do, people are more and more realizing that grounding and that belief is a fundamental part of the thing that we are doing right now.

Yeah, I mean, so much of it, like I said, I experienced, I learned it at NID, and then became a parent. I think you witness it firsthand, right?

Right.

You've experienced it. And then you wish the same for your child, right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

I think when I saw my son experience his own education with such a sense of distance and passivity, I kind of said, my God, I can't imagine him spending another 15 years, you know, doing this. It just didn't sit right with me. And so much of it could have been, well, this is the way it's always, what's the problem? I went through a similar experience, no biggie. I turned out okay. We could rationalize so much of it. And that's why change doesn't happen because we can rationalize it and say, listen, I turned out fine, so can't be that bad, right? And that isn't enough because it happens by chance that you got out of the system. That is not what we hoped for every child. Every child's right has to be that they have agency. That's where the design process, and I think gave me the confidence, or at least the optimism to say there must be a different way. And again, like I keep saying, I didn't set out to change education.

Right.

It's my son's story, right? So it was a story I had agency for and the skills for. Subsequently, of course, we grew as a team into so much of the capabilities that we had, but it grew as a small story. Yes.

You know? Yeah, yeah. Well, as I would say, probably a lot of the best things do because they're coming from a deep place of relationships. And one of the things, I don't know whether you said it or it's in the book, but that it's not about seeking approval, it's about seeking meaning, right? And so what have you, you're talking a lot of the risk-taking, the snakes and all that, the breaking tradition. You're not seeking approval, but there's something else you're seeking, right? It's this, there's this deeper thing about what is a meaningful life? What does it mean to live a rich and meaningful life for our young people? And that seems to be the driver behind a lot of what you're doing.

Yeah, because so many people have often asked me, what's different about Riverside? Tell us what's different. And I keep saying, boss, there's nothing different. I believe what it is, is that children know they have to make a difference, right? And that nuance of different and difference, therein lies the meaning. If you're focused to say, let's be different, then it's more cosmetic. You know, it is more on, you know, okay, the infrastructure or all the other little trappings of what it can be good. But making a difference is a deep and difficult and messy and ambiguous and, you know, that's the charm and the challenge of both.

Right, exactly. And what did you say? Not the best school in the world, but the best school for the world.

For the world. Love it.

Exactly. No, it's great. Really cool. So the design piece though, obviously is crucial. And again, one of the things you say early on in the book, in the introduction is schools must be a place where children grow, thrive, and graduate as empowered, humane citizens. But crucially, not by chance, but by design. And so this idea of humane by design, I think again, it's like speaks to some of those really fundamental things about what it means to be human, which we need more and more of right now, but not just letting those things happen accidentally, but like humane by design. So I just think that's amazing. So yeah, could you just maybe speak to that piece about the intentionality behind the design?

Yeah. You know, in Hindi, there's a lovely saying that gives the distinction so beautifully. It says, in saan and in saaniyat ke beech mein baat farda ke, that means between being human and having humanity, they're very different ways we live, right?

Amazing.

So I think, I keep saying human is a species, or we just happen to be on the planet as this species, and we haven't done a very good job, if I might say. Of course, there are some remarkable experiences, but within us lies the choices we make. And at the school, at Riverside, as you can see, our values are what make us human, right? And it's not just the actions, but it's the values. So I think when we were identifying the values we would put our weight behind, it just so happened that the values allowed us to look at choices of being empathetic, being ethical, pursuing excellence, elevating others in evolution. And these happen to be universal, not bound by geography or borders, right? So I think for us, we wanted to be sure that whilst the values ground us in our local sort of context, it was also universal for children to go anywhere and exercise those choices. Being empathetic is not something that you can do only in India. I mean, it's, it's a universal value. So we thought when we identified the values, we did a lot of soul searching as a team to figure out what are the values that we would love to have every student graduate with. And there could have been so many more. But I think finally, when we chose the 5 E's, as it were, it allowed us to say that humanity, I mean, being humane, when we action these values every day, so it becomes a mindset. So I think when we hit on those, we said, ah, that's what we want to wake up to every single day. That was a really great moment in our journey at Riverside to say, ah, okay, that's our purpose, that's what we want to be.

Yeah. But, but I think I would go even further than that in the sense that quite a lot of people articulate their values. And, and I mean, you know, institutionally, the, the schools will articulate their values really well. And, and I was talking with a recent conversation with Trevor McKenzie about inquiry. Living those values intentionally by design is quite a different thing because often you walk into a place and they, you know, it's like, well, they're saying they really value this, but I'm seeing this. And actually I think the design piece seems to have come through very clearly in really micro processes that you have been really intentional about in order to live the values.

I couldn't agree with you more because you're absolutely right. Values are ambiguous. You know, they're great words and can often be in a poster in a school or an organization. But how do you action the values, right? And I keep talking, coming back to the idea of math. I say, if for instance, you want to build biceps, then the math is the number of days and how often you do the exercises to build that particular thing. It's exactly the same with mindset. So the idea of the values was— can't be one time, like, you know, every Friday we would do it. We will do math every single day, but for the values, we'll do it once in a week. Typically, that's how we grew up, right? We would have moral studies on a Saturday, and invariably it'd be taken to do some extra homework or extra math. So if you do the math, you're saying content is fine, but what about the character piece? If it doesn't have the same weightage and the same math that you add up, then it's less likely that the values get embedded. So I think for us to then take the values and design processes that could be put into the timetable was really at the heart of the change. Because the timetable then became our conscience. If our value proposition was humane citizens with an I can mindset, it had to show up in the timetable. Yeah, that artifact was, I think, for us, the real innovation and the real design. It was like a thing of beauty when we put it together. Oh my God, that's it. That's the piece that is visible.

Absolutely. And I love that. And you said it in our first conversation, the timetable is an artifact of conscience. And I've used that so many times because I think it's so true. So I'd love— one of the ways I thought perhaps we could structure some of the conversation was just, you talk about this recipe for intentionality, right? So we've slightly glossed over the design and there's a lot in the design piece in terms of the FIDS framework and, you know, feel, imagine, do, share. And that's— so one of the things I feel that you are just absolutely exceptional at is somehow distilling really deeply complex things into very neat simple, but, you know, deep frameworks. And the FIDS is, it's a perfect example of that. And I know that it's gone crazy in terms of, you know, people using it in all sorts of countries all over the world, which is amazing. And with Design for Change and things. But there is, there's this idea of recipe, the recipe for intentionality, which you talk about in the book. And then the middle part of the book is structured around that. And so perhaps could we just talk briefly about each one? So the first part of that recipe for intentionality is culture.

Yes.

Right. So maybe because I think, again, never having visited Riverside, I would love to one day, but the descriptions that you give all throughout, and I've heard you speak about before, of the kind of culture in the organization is very strong. And again, lots of people talk about this, but you've got to actually live it. You've got to actually kind of be it, right? So what is it about the culture that's part of that recipe? And how do we be intentional about that?

I think at the heart of the intentionality is when an intent becomes action, right? That's intent, right? So intent alone doesn't change anything. But when intent is put into action, that's when you get a desired impact, whatever that is. Your intent could be to be highly disciplined, okay, command and control. Your action would be like the Army, right? And the Army, that's what you need. And you need to have a certain command and control, which works really, really well. That's how cultures get built. What is your intent? How does it become action to finally give your impact? So Riverside, when the intent was very clear, the student agency had to be the intent, human values had to be the intent and the mindset. Like you said, the action component was not only just designing the processes, but finally the timetable. Now, the beauty with, with what we actually sort of realized again as part of the iterative was that every stakeholder or every person that was involved in finally the child thriving had to be part of this intentional story. Most schools, while do a fair amount of work and say, let's do something on the curriculum or the teacher training, forget that there are many other players that have to be part of this story of intent. So when we crafted the 6 pillars, which is part of the book, which I would have talked about, oh, it is magic. We said, ah, here is the systems approach. Cultures are built on systems approach. So when we were able to identify the 6 pillars that make any school across the world, some in terms of focus, you can vary a little, but effectively, these are the 6 pillars that are, again, say, universally sound. Then every pillar needed to have a role and a goal. So, if you look at it as concentric circles, if the child is in the middle, then you have the pillars, and then you have the vision. So, it kind of really kind of feeds internally. And that is really how we were able to build culture that every player, every person, every stakeholder, towards this particular vision had to be part of the story. So the recipe for intentionality said that, yes, these are sound ingredients, like a recipe. And if you put them together and you know how to play the things, you'll be able to make it. And why I say recipe is because the context is true to you. Now, you might be in Brazil, and you might not have that particular ingredient, you can always replace it and make it true to you. But the basic ingredients are sound. Yeah, the basic ingredients are universal. So that's why I use recipe as a metaphor for how do you build your own spaces.

Yeah, no, that's great. And I would, I'm really curious about how it's, how that recipe has changed, which I'd love to ask you about in different countries. But I mean, one of the examples that I thought was powerful in the book was just the kind of transparency internally, you know, between those stakeholders. So you talk about the principal's office and, you know, not breaking down those boundaries between those things. And so that actually that there is an ability for the young people, for example, to interact and see what the principal is doing, or, you know, and see how these processes— there's a level of transparency built into the way that you've chosen to operate that then feeds this culture of, you know, the involvement of all of those stakeholders you were just talking about.

You're right. I mean, I think, like I, I reference in my book, my vision of the principal's office was always one of power, right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

Later, when I met her, I said, oh my God, she's such a nice lady, but You never get to see that. And then you build these stories of power and hierarchy when you grow up and you start thinking that there's certain things that are out of bounds and that's how it has to be. You need permission all the time and you start believing that, right? And then there is often this idea of compliance. You know, if I'm not told, I have to be obedient. So you actually, unbeknownst to you, you figure out the choreography of life in those first 15 years. And it's very difficult to dismantle these kind of mindsets, right? And but if our children had the opportunity to see life with a far more transparency, far flatter, far more on negotiation and co-creation, they start believing that that's the way life functions.

Right?

Right. And then they go out and hopefully create their own systems, which has the opportunity to be inclusive, to have more joy, to have more respect. So I think it just became a design sort of solution that how do we dismantle those borders? And how does it matter where I sit? How does it matter, right, if the work is far more important? So I think by doing that, it was surprising the fallout of it. There was far more respect amongst all the stakeholders, far less bullying, you know, all that automatically kind of experience simply because, you know, there is this general sense that there is an adult or somebody in the space occupying it. So therefore, let my behaviors be far more built on civic respect and code. And you do that again and again and again. By the time you're 15, it just becomes part of habit. You don't think that bullying somebody is a cool thing. You just grow into that. And then eventually you take these stories out. Again, I talk about math. 15 years is a long time. And what an opportunity, right? So if we can do the math well, and really understand the number of times you do that behavior, Absolutely.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So yeah, I mean, there's a lot there and the processes I'll come to in a minute where I think there's a lot of that routine institutional habitual kind of behavior. But the second element of the recipe for bringing intentionality is values. And you've spoken to some of the values already, but one of the things I wanted to ask you about is the time when your values really get tested are when things get tough. And you talk about the, you know, in 2012 with the, you were building year on year Riverside and then, you know, the rubber hits the road where the young people really need to think about, well, examinations and, you know, India as a context for exam factories and all of this culture around high-stakes testing. And it's incredibly pressurized, as I understand it. And so if you could just talk about that, how did the values really come into play when, when things actually got quite challenging around the outside world almost coming into the internal process?

I mean, while there were many such experiences, but that, that was a watershed moment because finally, you had to live out the promise of a school as well. You had to make sure children had the kind of grades or the results for them to go to the next level of their journey, which is finally college. So when we experienced that first sort of hurdle, when we thought we'd aced it in the grade 10, and then the 11th, you know, we hadn't anticipated the amount of rigor that was required. You know, it could have been so easy to do a knee-jerk reaction, right? Retreat, to say, okay, all of that was great till 10, but finally when it really matters, we're gonna go back to the, to the most traditional way. And again, the idea of co-creation, which is really the operating tool that we use, by then we had used it so much, it had become such a great way to lean into solutions that we just, we just went back into that and we got the teams in, we got the kids in, we got the families in, and we did a quick 2-day design share to just understand what are we holding onto? What do we stand for? What should we let go? And that was a good thing to ask. What should we let go? Right? So what were the non-negotiables that we must have? The service, we must have agency, and we must have the core curriculum. These three pieces were non-negotiable. The rest could be optional. The very fact that at that time, when we looked at option versus non-negotiable, became a design solution. I think all of it came down to the values, all of them came down to the design process. Because we were so— we had so much confidence in the process by then, because it had served us so well. Every time when we encountered something, we leaned into the process, we had fidelity to each step. We didn't rush into doing what— we slowed down, we got the insights, and we were able to move forward from there. But yeah, that's why I keep encouraging schools that we work with now and the trainings that we do, that that moment of getting the insights is so much more important than just action, right?

Absolutely.

And you—

one of the things I heard you talking about, but the idea of you're not actually solving problems— problem solving is a difficult framing actually, because it starts with the problem and definition of the problem and all of those things. Actually, what you're doing is solution discovery, and that's— it kind of speaks to what you were— you're referring to there, just— and then maybe that leads us on to the next part of the recipe, which is about process, and that's So what is it about solution discovery that— why did you shift that kind of framing away? Because often it's about solving problems in education, right?

Yeah. Oh, I think for me, and at least this is not really my understanding, but really the education I had in design, about that problems are built on assumptions, right? The moment you— oh, that's a problem, often the framing in your mind is stress and assumptions. You know, there's somebody to blame and complain, right? That's the scenario that happens. And Often when you enter into trying to solve it from a problem standpoint, there's a tendency to be reactive. There's a tendency to be quick fix. There's a tendency to say, who's to blame quickly, top down. Okay, it serves that purpose and it's, oh, it's done. Oh, it's solved. But when you embark on solution discovery, it's more an investigative process. It is more, you know, getting insights. And of course, it's working not against the person or the problem, but it's with. And that distinction is massive, because then you're releasing yourself of the weight of solutions by finding and encountering it. And that is such an exciting thing, because there will be times you'll wake up and say, oh my God, I didn't see that at all. And I didn't notice that. But it is, I have to say, a difficult frame to be in, right? We are more inclined to love action. So often action becomes our way to feel that we've accomplished something and we've done something. It makes us feel good. So I find that the slowing down and having the faith in the process is a learned skill.

Nice.

So remove the assumptions and you start with a fresh way to be curious and be empathetic.

Yeah. And almost the structure itself allows you to pull back a little bit. I mean, there's a, I don't know if you know that there's a a book and a website about liberating structures. And I, I think I maybe heard you use the same phrase, but that idea that the structure actually is quite liberating.

Yes.

To allow you to not be so focused on this goal that we've gotta fix this thing we've gotta do, but actually trust the process cuz the process is structured. I think that's great. And I mean, there's so many great phrases that you use, but the other one was possibility comes with causability, right? So, and again, it's that So that's what I'd love to talk about now is the idea of time.

Yes.

Because you, again, time is sacred. You know, slowing down is really giving you space to remember the values and do the things you really need to do as a community that are right for that moment. There's an amazing graphic in the book, which I would really recommend people go and look at, which is about how you use time and how you've almost kind of looked at the whole year breaking it down in terms of really micro-level day by day out to the— it's just a fabulous diagram because it's not all the boxes and cells that you'd expect in a spreadsheet or one of the— there's very kind of officious bureaucratic ledgers of time management. It's much more open than that, which I like just visually, but I think it says so much about the way that you have really intentionally thought about process and how that process uses the time that you have available. 'Cause there's a million things we could do with the time, right? So you're choosing. So maybe could you perhaps, yeah, just talk a little bit about that in terms of the intentionality around the use of the time in the day and then some of the, like out to some of the years framing.

So I think what I've learned, I mean, this is of course our own internal discovery over the years that there's an approach to looking at time, right? There's an approach. You don't just section time, right? Typically, we have grown up with a ribbon model. This follows, this follows, this follows. And, you know, it's like a checklist, you know, okay, I've done a little bit more, etc. But if your vision, like, for instance, it starts with a vision. If our vision was graduating humane citizens with an I can mindset, sounds very grand, great. But it's followed by values, right? What are the values that will serve this? Finally, the values have to be actioned into processes. That's what we've done. The processes get put into the pillars. And then finally, all of them must emerge in your timetable. But the real beauty is that the time has to be that in your smallest timestamp, your values don't emerge, then the math will not add up. So, look at the 50 minutes that you have, right? If in the 50 minutes, your values don't appear, then think about the 7 times you have 50 minutes in a day, and then, of course, in a week. So we distilled our values and our value proposition down to that very single session and that smallest timestamp. And when we realized that we could embed our values into the 50 minutes, then we added what the day should look like. Should our values appear? Should it start with empathy? Should there be agency? Should there be ethics? You know, when we looked at our values and our day, We said, ah, every single day and remove everything else from the week and the month. If every school can just take a single day and make sure their value propositions appear, then the math will show up. So for us, time was really about putting your values into action. And that was like one, oh, really aha moment for us too. I remember Andreas Schleicher from OECD had come to Riverside a couple of months ago and he had just 10 minutes with us because he was going to meet the government. Like I said, Andres, you have to come and see the school. So he walked in and I said, Andres, I have to show you just the one thing. And I showed him that timetable. He got it. He said, Kiran, that's it. You know, because so much of the work we say is about great theories, talks and stuff. But when you can distill and put it down into a timetable that has— shows your intent, you sort of say, okay, I can make that, you know. So I think that was such a great moment. Yeah.

No, that's amazing. And I think the thing I also really appreciated about it is how it nests out into the, you know, because obviously when we think about the timetable, we think about those smaller boxes of time by day, like you say, the 50-minute lessons or whatever. But actually there's also these— how do those things thread out to things like, for example, the open house event that you maybe have once a year, or, you know, so I think That nesting of, and again, maybe it comes back to what you were saying about that, the iterative and the repetitive in a good way. You're kind of really embedding certain habits, but they run rituals, right? Throughout. So the Konglom, for example, and then, you know, that, that, but then that happens in a different way on a weekly basis. And then, you know, and then you have these bigger moments of opening up to the outside world with the open house, for example. So yeah, I dunno, there's something there.

Also, as you've noticed, In most education establishments, timetable is typically the academic timetable.

Exactly.

You've seen this timetable has all the stakeholders, it has what happens with the parents, teachers and students. So suddenly, the timetable, like I said, is a systems approach. Does everybody appear in the timetable and everyone has a role to play towards student agency?

Yeah.

So the timetable then involves all partners into that particular artifact. And that really what makes it unique.

Yeah, but also if I could, one of the things, as I said earlier, the way that you distill some of the really essential essences of, of the things that, where the values are, right? Where the, the important things. I think if anybody working in a school imagined that they were gonna look at this entire overarching vision of weekly plus monthly plus termly plus yearly calendar all on one thing, they would think it was a completely overwhelming experience of looking at this many-page document or, you know, this spreadsheet that goes back a million miles. Actually, you've somehow distilled it into this incredibly beautiful and elegant, really concise diagram, which I think is no mean feat, right, to be able to kind of capture this thing. Yeah, it's very powerful.

It was like I said, it's been 23 years, right? I mean, we've had enough time to say how often should that be? And then we've been able to figure out, okay, that's once a year, or this is many times, this is once a week. I think we were able to also figure out how often something needs to put on the timetable.

Yeah.

Now when we work with schools, a lot of schools we have to customize, we say, okay, maybe they can't do it every week. So then we work with them to say, okay, like the principles, like I said, the recipe sound, but you might want to do it once in the week. But the very fact that emerges enough times to build habit, right? That's what we have to do. And that's what we work with schools to say, it can't be just a notional, you know, good-to-have thing. So we distill out, we say, what we call the foundation timetable, and then you can layer it. So foundation timetable, we've already figured out with some schools to say, we've actually, if you count all of them, we've got around 35 processes that appear. But with a school that wants to be at the lean version, we say 12. We've identified the 12 that will still make you have a culture that is built on agency. You do that and say, okay, then you can layer up.

Yeah.

You can add as you grow up. Yeah. Go into the, into the school.

Fantastic. And I think also just worth dwelling on the fact of codification, and you talk about that a lot, and I think that is not, again, not an insignificant part of what you have done. Mm-hmm. Because it's, of course, it's been very organic and very intentional and organic in, in the way that you've used design and the processes merged. And the, as you say, wisdom has been accumulated through time and experience and co-creation together, but you've been really careful about how do you then codify that? Because I think that, as I understand it, you find that a really important part of the process. So maybe you could speak about why is that so important?

You know, I keep saying being a designer is a curse and a blessing. Because, you know, it could have been so easy to say I'm doing it at Riverside, Pretty much that's it. Fine. But I think when we started growing as a team, we started realizing the need for involving everybody into this idea of the culture. And then I started realizing the kind of missteps that happened when we didn't have a common story to tell. Finally, stories make a space come alive, right? It's the stories of Virijin suddenly, because it takes you away from this is what I have to do rather than this is why I have to do it. A story in origin tells you the why, not just the what and the how. So as we started growing into our own capacity and schools would come to us and say, oh, we love what you're doing, can we do it? And we started thinking, oh, just a little bit of a curricular design should be enough. But we started coming, hearing back from leaders saying, you know, Kiran, when I go back and meet and I'm trying to tell my team, this is what it looks like, they don't see it, right? Teachers don't do what you say, they'll do what you do. And then that was the inspiration to say, okay, how interesting. How do I support somebody miles away to be able to tell the same story and contextualize it. And that sort of brought this idea of codification, not documentation. Big difference. Till then, we were just documenting a great activity or a great program, but that was just a small piece. It didn't tell the whole story. And codification became the idea of why something was needed. What were the insights? What did we wanna change? And then what will you need to be able to do? Oh, that exercise was fabulous. Tedious, a lot of time and energy. And I'll tell you why I say this was so important. I have visited some tremendous schools across the world. I've been inspired by some great practice and I've often felt, oh my God, I wish I had that recipe book, you know, and I could take it to India and I could do magic with it. And I found the gap in that. I said, my God, what a loss of great wisdom and great insights that anybody could have benefited from. So for me, it was a great exercise, not only for us as an archiving and usage for Riverside alone, because then it has a longevity way more than just me being there. You know, once I'm out, somebody will be able to say, ah, that was the story of why this happened. And the stories continue. So we did it internally for us, and we use it for our own onboarding. And it's become such a great exercise. My kids use it, the parents use it. Subsequently, now that we use it when we work with schools, it's such a great tool for them to see that story and say, okay, now I can make it my own.

No, I'm sure, sure.

But it's— I have to say, it's a tedious and tough— I wish most schools could.

Yeah, it also made me think of— because the last element of the recipe for intentionality is enablers, and one of the elements of that you talk about there is reflection. And I think that's kind of what you were saying there is that if you're not intentional about creating that space for reflection, it won't happen, you know, because you'll be on to the next thing. And schools are incredibly busy places. But so yeah, having that, those enablers in there that facilitate, yes, they might be tedious at times, but they have such an important role to play, right?

And I would say reflection is critical. Otherwise it is an activity and often we don't know what to take away. So very often when you go from activity to activity to activity, without giving time to reflect and say, what did I take from this? That's where retrieval and, and filing in happens.

Yeah.

So piece of reflection became such an important piece for us as a practice, for us, for our children, etc., that that finally makes the big change. And very often, when you do the RIBBON Model and just go from class to class, and at the end of it, it's like a buffet table, I have so much to eat, I don't know what I've taken away. Yeah, you know, same amount of time, I have lots to eat. And I take a little bit of everything and then I wonder what I'm supposed to taste. The taste and the slowing down is the piece of reflection that I would encourage schools to really cultivate. Yeah.

No, that's great. And the other enabler that I really appreciate was prototyping. And I know you talk about that a lot, but just, I think, you know, that idea of starting small, but you know, cuz change can feel really overwhelming, right? So just again, a bit of a design process of just prototyping small and learning. And reflecting and then growing. That seemed to be a big— another one of your enablers.

Because lots of schools say, but it's so big and it's so difficult. And it's okay, start in a class, start with a small group. Once you feel and you can, you can sense that it works well, then grow big. Because these become the, what we would say, impede us to change, right? I mean, do I have to do it all school? Do I have to do it with everybody? So generally, when you— when I encourage leaders to say, when you are embarking on journey of change, start small, take a particular group or try one particular thing. Don't go whole school at the same time. And that gives them confidence. Having said that, I have found that so many of them rely on the processes we've already designed to say, okay, I don't have to worry about figuring it out, I can contextualize it. And that comfort gives them a lot of confidence. Oh, okay, I get the nuts and bolts, I've got the recipe. I can make it my own. They are happy to do the change better. So I think the platform allowed us to do even more service to change.

Great. Yeah, no, great. And I mean, that's where I'd love to finish if we can, just because there is a, there's an interesting tension there for me in the sense that so much of what really rich things happen come kind of from the ground up, right? I mean, they come from the place you're in. It's very specific to the culture of the local place, nationally, the relationships of the people. Whether you've got this incredible person called Kieran who's just making everybody dance and driving the whole thing, or you have a different kind of a character person leading, there's a very specific context there, right? And I think so there's almost a tension there for me in how you then take this idea of a recipe with these universals, but then allow it to flourish in very specific particular context. And I know it is happening in lots of different countries. So how is that? For you? Like, how are you seeing it show up and change the recipe?

Well, I have to say, you know, the biggest thing we did was not offer content. We offered context in terms of a framework. The framework is the recipe, right? And the framework means that I can use that anywhere I am. And because of that, I mean, and I'll tell you about Design for Change. In fact, we're right now capturing the innovations that have happened from our partners across the world. We're putting together Innovations Playbook. It has been incredible, right from using FIDS as a gamification in Brazil to curriculum in India to a teacher training platform in Ecuador to a whole toolkit and toolbox in Taiwan to after-school programs. So what is beautiful is that the framework has so much universal appeal and it is so versatile in its context that our partners were able to take it and fly with it.

Nice.

Because the feel, imagine, do, share is sound. We must start with empathy. We must be creatively imaginative. We must put into action and then inspire others. There's no controversial disconnect between the 4 pieces of what we're offering. But how it sets its roots in a particular context is what we are now finding. And because of that, we're now putting together and consolidating this beautiful range of innovation. Because I finally know, Tim Logan, to be at a space where if anybody, a government, you know, organizations are thinking about how do we build student agency, they must think of ICAN as the reason. They must come to us and say, tell us, give us this entire playbook. If I'm in this country, in this context, can I have this recipe to make our children change the world to make it kinder and more just. And I think that would be a great reason to do all of the work we do.

Wow. Absolutely. And I'm sure, I mean, I'm sure that's been a huge motivation for you personally, but I think what I appreciate about that is that it, and I've seen this happen in multiple different contexts, not just in education, but in different places where, where certain, sometimes things end up relying on the person who started them, right? The founder problem, right? It's like, it's all about Kieran and, and the way that she has created this thing and is therefore not replicable in, in any other place because we don't have Kieran. And that's what you've done is taken those beliefs, those deep beliefs that you grew up with as a child and the snakes and all of the things, the, the belief in people's agency, but then created some frameworks that then can transfer that, that take it away from just being about this kind of charismatic leadership. Cult almost, right?

Absolutely right. I think I would have failed deeply if it had to be reliant on me. Yeah, I think the fact of these frameworks, the fact that we put together the processes, the fact that this timetable exists is independent of a person.

Exactly.

Yeah, that's what we created, that anybody anywhere with just having these tools at their disposal, having the framework at their disposal, having this timetable at their disposal, looking at their School as the, the 6 pillars. That's it. That's all you need. You need those tools and you need the frameworks. That's it. And those methods are ready. So I think that was something that we were, even as a team, were very keen to say that can we provide leadership? Can we provide schools with the tools that they can use and make it their own story? So I think that's been super cool.

Amazing. Thank you, Kiran. I mean, it's, yeah, it's so impressive. I'd so recommend the book to everybody just to really understand it. And because again, just because there's so much of use in there, it's, I mean, it's an incredible story, but it's also so much that you can just immediately start using in your own context. So yeah, no, thank you for just, I mean, obviously thank you for, for everybody for such an incredible amount of work that you've done in that context and showing that it's possible, right? And that again, not an insignificant thing, really showing that this, this belief in agency can Yes. Transmit into an incredibly generative context for these young people who are coming out. And I know you collect all the alumni stories and these incredible stories of young people who have gone through that experience and then gone out into the world with some of those beliefs in other people's agency as well as their own. And it's, you know, it's contagious and amazing.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, Tim Logan.

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